Mrs. Everything (26 page)

Some days Shelley talked about joining the Peace Corps. “I need a dose of reality,” she’d declare, and Jo would point out that there was reality all around them, much closer than Tanganyika. Some days, Shelley would talk about going to Europe—“the grand tour, they used to call it.” Her parents would pay, she said, and Jo would explain, again, that she wasn’t comfortable taking the Finkelbeins’ handouts. On a Monday she would want to move to Washington; by Wednesday she’d be thinking about getting a graduate degree in fine arts, or going to the Yale School of Drama, or going to the Rhode Island School of Design and learning to make sculpture and jewelry. Her voice, low and confiding, was perfect for radio, and her face was pretty enough for TV. Shelley could do any of it, and every day, Jo would listen, patient and amused at first and, eventually, frustrated and angry, as Shelley spun one version after another of the future. She could move to Hollywood and wait to be discovered! She could go to WWDT in Detroit and ask her ex-boyfriend for an audition! She could go to New York City and find a gallery to sell her bracelets!

Jo knew what she wanted for herself. At her mother’s insistence, she’d majored in elementary education and had graduated with a teaching certificate, but she’d taken every literature class she could fit into her schedule. If it was up to her, she would have applied to every graduate school she could find, and attend the one that offered her the best scholarship, and get a PhD in literature. She’d read all day, novels and poems, all the classics she
hadn’t gotten to in college, and she’d write all night, working on her own fiction. She would write, the way she’d always dreamed of doing, and if she couldn’t find a way to support herself as a writer, she’d teach, and she’d have a life surrounded by stories.

Her lit professors had encouraged her. They’d given her As on her papers, praised her reasoning and her prose, told her that she should pursue writing as a career. “I’m an education major,” Jo had said shyly, as her Modern British Literature professor had urged her to think about graduate school and pursuing a PhD. “Maybe I could teach literature?”

“Or you could study it.” Professor Klaas was one of a tiny handful of women on the Michigan faculty. She wore her hair cut short, and dressed like her male colleagues, in button-down shirts and tweed vests, only with skirts instead of pants. Professor Klaas lived with her research assistant, a buxom blond woman named Donna, and the rumors were that the two women were more than just friends. Jo had heard the ugly words that kids whispered about the professor—
dyke
and
bull dagger
were a few—but if Professor Klaas knew what people said about her, it didn’t seem to trouble her.

“You have a gift, Miss Kaufman.” She’d cocked her head in an inquisitive, birdlike way, examining Jo with her bright brown eyes. “I don’t see a class ring anywhere. Or one of those dreadful fraternity pins.”

“No,” Jo said.

“Not going to rush out of here and into wedlock?” Professor Klaas asked. “Trade your graduation gown for a white dress? Earn your MRS degree?”

“No,” Jo said again, thinking that if she could marry Shelley, she would.

“So why not, then? There are scholarships available, here in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. Some are even earmarked for female students who show particular promise.”

“I’ll think about it,” Jo said. And she had, telling herself that when Shelley finally made up her mind, whether she agreed to
New York City or someplace else, Jo would find a way to keep reading and writing.

But for long months, Shelley had refused to commit. Her moods were as changeable as the spring weather in Ann Arbor. Sometimes, she would disappear, for a day or even a weekend, telling Jo that she was needed at home, to sign some papers having to do with her trust fund, or to attend some family function, a wedding or a bris. Sometimes she would sit in silence on her love seat, staring out the window, smoking, with an ashtray balanced on one knee, and she wouldn’t want to talk or even leave the room. “Stop crowding me!” she’d snapped once, when Jo had stopped by the library, the way she’d done a dozen times before without incident, only that night Shelley had yelled at her, in a voice loud enough that three or four students bent over their work had looked up to stare. Startled and hurt, her face burning, Jo had gone back to her dorm room, where two hours later, Shelley showed up with a bouquet of roses that she’d bought somewhere, all apologies and kisses. “Don’t be mad at me,” she’d begged. “It’s that time of the month.”

Jo knew that Shelley got terrible menstrual cramps, and would gather her hot-water bottle and the bottle of pills from her doctor back home and crawl into bed until they passed. She suffered from migraines, and she’d have to lie in her darkened room with a wet washcloth over her eyes for hours. Jo loved her intramural basketball and volleyball games, and loved taking long, aimless walks around the campus. Shelley didn’t even like walking through a parking lot, and her idea of exercise was carrying a few bags of new clothes up the stairs. Shelley would call her parents every Saturday morning, and she’d be in a terrible mood afterward, pacing around her room and muttering things under her breath. “Why do you love me?” she’d asked Jo once, after a Saturday of sulking and smoking over something her mother had said. “I’m no good for you.” Jo would hold her and tell her that she was wonderful, funny and smart and irresistibly sexy, and that she wanted to be with her forever. She’d comb Shelley’s hairspray-sticky hair
with her fingers, and massage Shelley’s shoulders, and the back of her neck. And finally—finally—after weeks of discussions, and consulting maps and travel guides, Shelley had settled on the trip.

In the bedroom, Shelley curled on her side with her eyes shut. “Ten more minutes,” she mumbled. Jo pulled the covers back down. “Come on, lazybones.”

While Shelley grumbled and pulled the covers over her head, Jo walked to the window, thinking about her sister, who was most likely still with her friends, making her way back from Newport. In high school, in her kilts and her bobby socks and sweater sets, with her hair bobbed and curled, Bethie had looked like the rest of the pretty, popular girls. At Michigan, with her long hair hanging past her shoulders, in one of her long dresses with strappy leather sandals on her feet and beaded earrings dangling from her ears, she also fit in perfectly, right down to her glazed expression and the roach clip in her pocket.

Jo thought sometimes that Bethie liked to play at being a rebel, when the truth was that her sister had a genius for conformity, for making herself the best, most stylish example of whatever version of femininity was currently in fashion. That, along with her accommodating personality, meant that things would be easy for Bethie. Jo had felt equal amounts of admiration and envy as she’d kissed Bethie’s cheek and given her one last hug, inhaling her scent of patchouli incense and pot.

“Okay,” Shelley grumbled, and finally got out of bed. Jo pulled up the sheets, smoothed the comforter, and plumped the pillows. They were leaving their little cave of sunshine and green and going to Shelley’s house for the day. Shelley’s parents and her brothers were up north, at the family’s vacation home in Charle-voix, the staff had all been given two weeks off, and Shelley and Jo would have the house in West Bloomfield Hills all to themselves. They could sun by the pool (naked, Jo imagined, feeling a pleasant shiver at the thought of Shelley with her hair wet and sleek, rising from the water), and get Shelley packed for the trip (Jo was sure Shelley would want to bring everything she owned).

Jo had been to Shelley’s house once before, for Passover the
previous spring. She’d been excited, and a little scared, nervous about meeting Shelley’s family, worried that she’d commit some terrible breach of etiquette at the table, or wear the wrong clothes, or accidentally blurt out something about Shelley’s mother’s alcoholism, or the truth of their relationship. It hadn’t helped that Shelley had gotten more and more moody as the day of the visit approached, swinging between snappish and solicitous. “You won’t hate me, will you?” she’d asked when they pulled onto Shelley’s street. “Once you see how I grew up?”

Jo promised that of course she wouldn’t, but it made her wonder what Shelley was ashamed about; what she wanted to hide. College was a great equalizer, where everyone wore the same sweatshirts, purchased from the university bookstore, and everyone took the same classes, read the same textbooks, and ate the same burgers at the Union, but there were occasions when Jo was forced to consider how her own upbringing differed from Shelley’s, whose parents had thrown her a Sweet Sixteen for three hundred guests (“two hundred and eighty-five of their closest friends, and fifteen of mine,” Shelley joked), and had taken her to Europe instead of Lake Erie. Shelley had grown up riding, while Jo had barely seen a horse. Shelley’s brothers attended boarding schools on the East Coast, where they rowed crew and played lacrosse. Shelley’s mother went to Paris or New York City like Jo’s mother went to Kresge’s or to the butcher shop.

Jo had promised herself that she wouldn’t gawk at Shelley’s house, or make the mistake of calling it a mansion (“it’s just a house,” Shelley had said sharply on the one occasion that Jo had used the word), but when they turned into the gravel driveway, she couldn’t stop herself from staring. Set half a mile off the road, in a copse of manicured woods, the house looked like some kind of institution, a small museum or a dormitory at an old English college. It was a sprawling structure, three stories of cream-colored half-timbered plaster, with a slate roof and a paved path leading to the enormous front door, a slab of oak that had a gigantic iron ring set in its center, instead of a knob.

Jo stared up at the grays and browns and cream-colored tiles
of the roof, the huge iron ring on the door. “Eh,” she said, feeling grateful that her voice sounded steady. “My house is bigger.”

Then the door swung open and Shelley’s brothers, Tom and Pete, had come pelting down the stairs, bounding around like puppies, arguing over which one would get to carry Jo’s bags, their voices overlapping as they recounted for their big sister their triumphs on the lacrosse field and the story of the new turtle that Pete had gotten for his birthday. Jo had met Shelley’s mother, Gloria, a petite blond woman in what Jo thought was a real Chanel suit, the same kind Jackie O had worn. Gloria looked almost as young as her daughter, until you got up close and saw the network of fine wrinkles that webbed her face. Shaking Gloria’s hand, Jo felt its tremble, and saw how all of the woman’s makeup was the tiniest bit askew, the lipstick extending past her lips, one eye lined more heavily than the other. Jo knew, because Shelley had told her, that Gloria Finkelbein had been to half a dozen discreet and costly facilities to dry out, and that so far it hadn’t taken. When Shelley was little, Gloria had hidden bottles of wine and pints of vodka in her boots, in the pockets of her coats, in the boathouse and in the toilet tanks, and Shelley and her brothers would find them and pour them out, like it was a scavenger hunt or a game.

“Since the last place, she’s got it in her head that she can’t be that bad if she’s not drinking during the daytime,” Shelley said, speaking quietly as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. “So she sits, and she waits, and she watches the clock. I bet sometimes she sneaks something into her tea.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jo, knowing how inadequate the words were. At school, Shelley had hardly ever talked about her family. The visit had let Jo fill in some of the blanks. She wondered if Shelley or her brothers had ever come home from school or baseball practice to find their mom reeling, or passed out, and if a drunk mother was worse than a permanently enraged one.

“Don’t be.” Shelley shrugged. “I’m used to it. There’s plenty of people here to make sure everything gets taken care of. She
doesn’t really have any responsibilities except looking pretty. And I made my dad get Tom and Pete out of the house, so at least they’re away from the worst of it.” Shelley had flopped on her bed. Her childhood bedroom was actually a suite of rooms, with a private bathroom and dressing room and a window seat that looked over the lawn and the lake, and Jo had wished fiercely that she was a boy, so that she wouldn’t have to worry about the door being locked before she could take Shelley in her arms and kiss her and tell her that she was brave and smart and strong and a wonderful big sister.

Shelley’s father had shown up late to the Seder and had come bounding into the dining room after they’d all been seated. Leo was as short and disheveled as his wife was cool and elegant, with stains on his tie and shirt buttons straining over his belly. He was bald, with a jutting beak of a nose and floating wisps of white hair that danced around a pink skull, and he spoke with a heavy Yiddish accent that reminded Jo of her own father. She could tell that he adored his daughter. “My Shelley, the scholar,” he called her, the last word sounding like “skah-lah,” and Shelley had smiled at him fondly, waving the compliment away. Leo had held Jo’s chair out with a flourish, introduced her to their family friends, the Adamses, Morrie and Bev, their daughter, Leah, who blushed every time fourteen-year-old Peter looked her way, and their little boy, Richard, who wore shorts, knee socks, and a shirt with a tiny bow tie. “And of course my luffly wife you’re already meeting.” Gloria had given Jo a glassy nod, extending her hand as if they hadn’t already met. As the Seder progressed, Jo noticed the way Gloria seemed to cringe every time her husband opened his mouth.
German Jewish
, Shelley had explained. Gloria’s relatives were German Jews, who’d made their way to the United States in the 1880s and were as close to the aristocracy as Jews in America could be. Leo had come over as a teenager, in 1921, not knowing a word of English, after his parents had died in Poland. He’d moved in with cousins and started off selling remnants of fabrics and trim from a cart when he was fourteen,
saving enough to open his first store at twenty, franchising the business at twenty-eight. By thirty, he was rich enough to woo and marry the youngest and loveliest daughter of one of Detroit’s oldest Jewish families. Now there were seven Forest Fabrics in Detroit and its suburbs, and the business had expanded into Ohio. New York State, Shelley had told her, would be next. Jo carefully spooned up her matzoh ball soup, wondering if either husband or wife was happy with the bargain they had made, and what Shelley thought of her parents’ marriage, and how their choices would inform her own.